Despair in dramatic characters isn’t necessarily dramatic. Woe-is-me on the stage can easily translate into woe-are-we in the audience. So should theaters ignore despairing, even suicidal characters? No, but playwrights and directors often feel compelled to go to great lengths to prevent us from falling asleep during their pity parties.

Charlie Saxton and Loren Lester

In Deborah Zoe Laufer’s End Days, at the Odyssey, Arthur Stein (Loren Lester) is a wreck. He was the sole survivor of the 65 colleagues with whom he worked at the World Trade Center on 9/11.

Now, in what was supposed to be a suburban refuge from the city, he spends his days drooped over the kitchen table, asleep in his pajamas, because he can’t sleep at night. His psychologically abandoned wife Sylvia has found solace in the very literal presence of a vision of Jesus (Andrew Ableson), who suggests that the rapture is imminent. Arthur’s and Rachel’s 16-year-old daughter Rachel (Zoe Perry) has assumed a goth countenance, so as better to intimidate anyone who might want to be her friend.

Zoe Perry, Charlie Saxton, Abigail Revasch, Loren Lester and Andrew Ableson

Into their dysfunctional den of depression strides an unlikely healer – teenage neighbor Nelson Steinberg (Charlie Saxton), with family issues of his own. He insinuates himself into the household because he has a crush on Rachel, who initially tries to push him away, along with everyone else. But eventually she finds Nelson’s enthusiasm for Stephen Hawking so contagious that she begins to relent – and in her own hallucinatory reaction to her family’s plight, she envisions Hawking himself (Ableson again), who speaks about his own secular concerns that humanity is ultimately doomed.

Sounds like fun?

Charlie Saxton, Abigail Revasch and Andrew Ableson

Actually Laufer’s play, as staged by Lisa James, is so much fun – so funny, in fact — and it has such a relatively upbeat ending that it’s a little hard to share the despair which is ostensibly at the play’s heart. The juxtaposition of these characters creates comic sparks right and left, and Saxton’s irrepressibly optimistic Nelson is a comic sparkplug in his encounters with all of the depressed.

In fact, Laufer goes one step too far by making Nelson not only a brainy and open-minded kid but also one who wears Elvis-impersonator outfits almost every day. This gimmick seems designed primarily for cheap laughs instead of plausible character revelation.

The plausibility of a couple other ingredients also feels strained. The family literally has no food in the house… because of Arthur’s lassitude? Or because no one is bringing in any income?  They appear to have once been an all-Jewish-secular family, and Sylvia’s recent conversion to extreme evangelical Christianity is never sufficiently explained.

Although the despair never seems to be taken completely seriously, I can’t blame Laufer for trying to lighten the mood with some dark comedy. The pace never lags. The parallels between the various styles of doomsday talk are a stimulating novelty for a dysfunctional family play, and the apparitions of Jesus and Hawking raise the play to a fanciful level that helps distinguish it from sitcom.

In other words, this is a play about despairing people that won’t drive the audience to despair.

Lena Kouyoumdjian, Cynthia Mance, Ann Stocking, Justin Davanzo in Sarah Kane's "Psychosis 4.48" at City Garage

Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis, on the other hand, plays like Kane’s invitation to join her down in the dumps — the very deep dumps. As you may have heard, it was written prior to the playwright’s own suicide, and it’s essentially a roughshod chronicle of  the descent of a young woman to the moment when she finally does the deed.

As chronicles go, it’s rather incomplete. We hear virtually nothing about her world prior to the onset of mental illness, what the first symptoms were, who else was in her life, how she tried to manage her affairs outside the doctors’ offices and drugstores, or anything else that might distract us from the sheer agony of her existence and her sometimes barely-accessible ways of expressing it.

She wrote the play almost as a poem, without stage directions or character designations. Large parts of it are fairly inscrutable. If Kane intended to give us a glimpse of what she was thinking, at times it’s none too clear.

Director Frédérique Michel , at City Garage, divided the script into six characters identified as “She” (Cynthia Mance), Brains #1-#3, “Psychologist” and “Nurse Head” – you might say they’re six characters in search of an author (or an editor). None of them exists independently outside “the deranged brain” (the description of the setting) of the suicidal “She.”

Lena Kouyoumdjian, Cynthia Mance and Justin Davanzo in City Garage's "Psychosis 4.48"

Perhaps in an attempt to make the production livelier, Michel also inserts a lot of rhythmic movement, derived from popular dance, and one sequence in which one of the male “brains” circles the entire set, while shirtless. While I’m grateful for any attempts to make the action move a little more briskly, I don’t see how these particular movements make much sense, thematically. Did Sarah Kane really imagine that part of her brain would be shrugging shoulders in time to the beat on her way into the abyss?

By the way, City Garage’s new space inside a gallery at Bergamot Station, with installations along the sidelines and in the lobby, is a much more evocative interior than the company’s previous cubbyhole near the Third Street Promenade. I haven’t seen the current Sganarelle, which is playing in rep with 4.48 Psychosis, but I look forward to seeing future productions that might be able to take some advantage of the proximity to the art.

**END DAYS photos by Enci

** Psychosis 4.48 photos by Charles Duncombe

End Days, Odyssey Theatre,  2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., LA. 8 pm Wed Aug. 31 and Sept. 14 and 21; 8 pm Thur Sept. 8 and 29 and Oct. 6 and 13; 8 pm Fri-Sat except Fri Oct 7; 2 pm Sun except 7 pm Aug 21 and Oct 2.. Closes Oct 16, 2 pm.  310-477-2055. www.OdysseyTheatre.com.

4.48 Psychosis, City Garage, Track 16, Building C1, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica. Thur-Fri, 8 pm. Closes Sept. 9. 310-319-9939. www.citygarage.org.